Melissa Munziata, a waitress at the Main Street Grill in New Smyrna Beach, is among many people have come to the conclusion that medical care should be a right.
“Without a doubt health care should be,” the 20-year-old said.
First of all, following the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, to be a natural right, something must exist in nature, inflict no cost or effort on the part of one's fellow citizens to practice it, be equally available to all and be inexhaustible.
The rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and things like free speech and freedom of religion require no cost or effort on the part of one’s fellow citizens.
Medical care can in no way be considered a natural right according to these criteria. It would be truly be wonderful if medical care could be made a right. However, every effort to make it into a right using a government program ends up being very disappointing and very expensive.
The basic problem with trying to make medical care into a right is that the laws of nature get in the way. In fact, that happens with virtually everything that people try to make into a right through a government program. Everything we try to do economically through government end up with very poor performance and very high costs.
Some wants we have tried to make into rights include education, affordable housing, retirement and others. The results can always be characterized as disappointing and very expensive. We always end up with much less than if we had not started the program and relied on the free market.
If you are looking for specific reasons why these programs don’t work well, consider that economic transactions must have at least five characteristics to be beneficial and efficient. The receiver of a good or service must have the right to choose what he gets and the responsibility to pay for it. The provider of a good or service must have the right and responsibility for the design of that good or service. He must compete with others and must have responsibility for profit and loss on the service or goods he is providing.
In the light of these five characteristics, notice that in the area of public education enlightened people have favored vouchers to try to cure the problems of the system. The reason vouchers are favored as a solution is that they supply some of the above characteristics that are otherwise totally missing in the public school system.
Vouchers introduce customer choice. Sometimes they induce and enable the customer to pay for at least part of his services. On the provider side they introduce some competition and maybe a little more effort to design and improve the product. However, there doesn’t seem to be much ability on the part of vouchers to introduce profit and loss into the equation so things will always be more expensive than necessary.
Returning to the problem of making medical care into a right, notice that all such attempts have been very disappointing wherever they have been tried. The dismal, predictable and inevitable chain of events that occur whenever and wherever health care is nationalized is spelled out in my blog of June 7,2008 entitled Socialized Medicine a Bad Fix.
It is indeed sad to see so many people trying to make health care into a right through government programs. This will never deliver results that are acceptable to Americans.
The best way to provide affordable health care to the most people is to return to the free market.